Author: Brett Venter

We’ve been expecting Samsung to announce new folding smartphones — the Galaxy Fold 3 and the Galaxy Flip 3 have turned up online in several ways in the last few months. At today’s Unpacked, the South Korean company made both of its 5G foldables official. Now that they’re official, here’s what you need to know about them both. As expected, the S Pen has been tweaked for use with the more fragile folding screens. But Samsung’s going to announce a new Galaxy Note anyway, right? Right? A more durable Galaxy Fold 3 5G  One of the biggest criticisms of Samsung’s…

In the latest illustration that influencers are paid to hold the opinions they do, Facebook has detailed an anti-COVID vaccination campaign it has dismantled on its network that used paid influencers to undermine trust in the vaccines. The now-banned entity behind the campaign, Fazze, is linked to a UK-based marketing firm but the subsidiary does most of its business in Russia. The campaign was directed, perhaps unusually, at Facebook users in India, Latin American and parts of the United States. Facebook removes influencer influence 65 Facebook accounts and 243 Instagram accounts associated with the campaign were removed from the platform,…

We’re very fond of concept cars, mostly because they look like the sort of whacky things we were sketching when crayons were still a big part of our daily lives. Audi’s new Skysphere concept car certainly springs from the mind of a pre-teen child who’s mad about cars — it’s an electric roadster that can extend its wheelbase to turn into a grand tourer. The only things missing are the flamethrowers and the ejection seat. Reach for the Skysphere https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0McQmw0h5mQ&feature=emb_logo The German automaker’s concept vehicle is a two-door electric convertible (in more ways than one). It goes from a roadster…

If you were wondering whether we’d one day live in a world where robot dogs are common, Xiaomi’s new Cyberdog (which, naturally, has to sit in the back of your Cybertruck while you play Cyberpunk) might just be your answer. See, we’re getting used to the idea of Spot the robot dog but at more than R110,000 a pop, we’ll probably never own one — no matter how well it can dance. Xiaomi’s newly-announced entry into the burgeoning robotic dog market is looking to go a lot more affordable. Throw a cyberdog a cyberbone here Let’s get the price out…

In case you somehow missed it, last week Apple detailed its plans to scan iPhones (and iCloud accounts) in the States for images of child abuse. WhatsApp head Will Cathcart followed the announcement with a Twitter thread calling Apple’s plans to implement ‘neuralMatch’ on its devices a “surveillance system”. And, honestly, it’s not really hard to see his point. Cathcart made his comments after being asked whether WhatsApp would implement a similar system on its platform. (The answer to that question is ” No”, by the way.) Point to WhatsApp  It’s really not hard to see what Apple wants to…

You expect a certain amount of… ‘creative interpretation’ on social media but you wouldn’t think that a social network for doctors would have an issue with anti-vaccine misinformation. But that’s apparently the case on Doximity — which is an excellent name for a medical professional’s social network… or a dark web information broker. This one is the former. Doctored information Doximity is an app designed for medical professionals to network — like LinkedIn, but everyone’s wearing a stethoscope — but of late it has seen an uptick of anti-vaccine posts on the service. A report from CNBC found that actual…

Okay, ignore the fact that we’ve used a Japanese video game to illustrate this story about Chinese app WeChat and its parent company Tencent being sued. It’s not some socio-political statement, it’s just ye olde internet meme (circa 2008). But the legal action being taken by Beijing prosecutors against Tencent is a little more serious. The tech-maker is already in the Chinese government’s crosshairs, despite rolling out facial recognition technology that’s supposed to limit the time kids spend playing video games. Can’t WeChat about this? Tencent, according to reporters at Reuters, is being sued over the ‘youth mode’ in WeChat…

Social media has had more than a decade to prove that your face is someone else’s fortune, but the Moscow Metro is really hammering the point home. The Russian transportation agency is trialling something called FacePay on its Filevskaya metro line. FacePay, as the name suggests, is a facial recognition system that lets users pay for things using biometric data — specifically those chiselled (or possibly crafted-from-pudding — hey, people are all different) features you’re carting around all day. Moscow Metro 2033? How it works in this particular instance is that eligible users will download the Moscow Metro app, upload…

Facebook is only called a social media company because they want you to keep using their services. In reality, Facebook is a data-harvesting company. Social media is just the threshing machine the company uses to separate out all of the useful bits of your life that keep Mark Zuckerberg in business. And, according to a new report from The Information, the company is investigating the potential of a whole new crop of user information — your encrypted messaging information sent over WhatsApp. See, users send masses of information over WhatsApp, but right now there’s just no way of using that…

In an excellent example of why pre-order pricing sometimes works, Virgin Galactic has set official ticket prices for a trip to the edge of space on board one of Richard Branson’s hybrid airplane rocket things. If you’d taken advantage of initial pricing, before anyone was wholly certain it was possible, you’d have paid R2.9 million (at today’s exchange rates), or $200,000. But now you’re stuck paying a little over R6.5 million to ride the rich man’s rocket — which is a certainly almost reasonable (if you’re a wealthy American) $450,000 a pop. Paying the price for Virgin Galactic Virgin Galactic…